A Paradigm Shift to Assembly-like Finite Element Model Updating

In general, there is a mismatch between a finite element model of a structure and its real behaviour. In aeronautics, this mismatch must be small because finite element models are a fundamental part of the development of an aircraft and of increasing importance with the trend to more flexible wings in modern designs. Finite element model updating can be computationally expensive for complex structures and surrogate models can be employed to reduce the computational burden. A novel approach for finite element model updating, namely assembly-like, is proposed and validated using real experimental data. The assembly-like model updating framework implies that the model is updated as parts are assembled. Benchmarking against the classical global, or one-shot, approach demonstrates that the proposed method is more computationally efficient since it takes 20% fewer iterations to obtain convergence, of which 95% comes from the subassembly models, which have fewer degrees of freedom and so are more computationally efficient. Despite requiring fewer model evaluations, the new approach retains the fidelity, within 1% of a joint natural frequencies and modal shapes index, of the global approach.